Middle School Dance Rules -- Elementary School Logic
by crumpledpaper33
Summary: "Nick sat upright in bed. He'd passed the f-ing LSAT but somehow the solution to this logic puzzle had escaped him all night." Nick figures out what Jess must have written on her valet ticket and decides to take a chance. A swoony ending to "First Date." Spoilers through that episode. Rated T for language and mild sexual content. Feedback, please! :-)


"'Night, Miller," she whispered.

"'Night, Day."

He shut the door behind him, rested his back against it and let out a long, slow breath.

He'd thought this "first date" was going to move them to the next level but instead they'd managed to wind up with the worst of both worlds. The "roommate dynamic," as Schmidt had rightly predicted, was totally screwed up now. Nick and Jess couldn't behave even remotely normally around each other anymore, as they'd just proved in the kitchen. And yet they weren't together either, instead consigned to the hell of endless sexual frustration known in Jess's parlance as "Middle School Dance Rules."

Un-fucking-believable.

Nick slid down the wall to a seated position and rubbed his hands over his face. Of course, he had no one to blame but himself. She'd made it clear there was going to be no more "funny business" until he could tell her how he felt, and who could blame her for putting on the brakes? She had a right to know what this was before going further - that is, if anyone could make sense of their insane dynamic of best pals-who-sometimes-really-hate-eachother-but-also- want-to-jump-eachother's-bones.

But for whatever twisted psychological reason buried in his past – absent dad, overbearing mom, who the hell knows? - he just could _not_ do it. Russell handed him that scrap of paper and he was like a desperate animal caught in a trap. He felt sweaty and panicked and finally, just to get it over with, he wrote the unbelievably lame-ass "_roomfriends_" on the valet ticket before handing it back to Russell and turning away in self-disgust. Russell – perfect-hair-perfect-house-perfect-fucking-life-Ru ssell- probably had no problem expressing his deepest emptions to the women he loved, probably did it in perfectly rhyming poetry, but that was not Nick's style. _No sir,_ thought Nick ruefully, sitting on the floor, _Nick Miller does not do big emotion - and especially when he has no idea how the other person feels_.

Groaning from self-loathing and physical effort, Nick hauled himself up to standing and then lay down on his bed. Staring at the ceiling, he started considering his options. He would search Craig's List tomorrow for a roommate spot in another apartment. He'd have to give everyone enough notice, though, or they'd never make this month's rent without his share. Schmidt would never forgive him for this – they'd been together for so many years it was embarrassing – and breaking the news was going to be even more unpleasant when Schmidt threw in the inevitable "I told you so's" that he totally deserved.

Nick rolled over on his stomach and put his pillow over his head, trying to silence his own thoughts. The scent of his freshly laundered pillow case taunted him; he'd washed his sheets yesterday with the faint hope that after he took Jess out to a swanky dinner, they might actually arrive back in this bed together. But now he was pathetically alone, reliving the valet ticket episode over and over in his head: that look of dismay on Russell's face when he opened both folded pieces of paper and saw what Nick had written, the way he then hastily put the slips of paper in his pocket and got himself and Brandi out of there as fast as he could.

But . . . slowly . . . another thought, hazy and unformed, started dancing around the periphery of this unpleasant scene in his head. Nick squeezed his eyes more tightly shut, trying to focus on what his brain was trying to tell him. Russell was horrified when he read the two slips of paper. _Check_. Nick had written something that made clear that he felt only casual affection, at most, for Jess. _Check_. But if Jess had written something equally flippant about Nick, would Russell have been horrified? Nick thought for a minute. Well, why would _that_ be horrifying? That would just be your standard friends-with-benefits situation, everyone it in with their eyes open, no one gets hurt. So . . .

Nick sat upright in bed. He'd passed the fucking LSAT but somehow the solution to this logic puzzle had escaped him all night: Jess must have written something real about him, something that made her vulnerable, something so different from what Nick had written that Russell, who obviously still cared about Jess, wanted to protect her from having to share it with her asshole "roomfriend."

Nick sat there for a minute, trying to get his mind around this realization. He looked at it from every angle to make sure he wasn't missing something, then finally let it sink in. Jess must feel something for him. Something more than roomfriend - maybe a lot more.

He swallowed hard, then walked over to his desk and rummaged through the piles of credit card bills, an empty potato chip bag and dirty laundry, looking for something, anything he could write on. All he could come up with was a crumpled drugstore receipt, which he smoothed out the best he could. On one side he wrote:

_Here's what I wrote tonight: Roomfriend_

_Here's what I would have written, if I hadn't been such a coward_.

He drew an arrow and turned the receipt over. Now he was feeling it all over again – the same cold sweat, the same dry-mouthed panic. But he forced himself to take a deep breath and continued to write:

_She's the most beautiful person I know, inside and out. I don't deserve her, but I want to become a man who does_.

Before he could second-guess himself, he crossed the length of his room, opened his door as quietly as possible, slipped the receipt under Jess's door, and retreated back into his own.

And then immediately started planning how to get the fucking note back.

_I yell "Fire!" everyone runs out into the living room, I get the note before she knows what's going on, then I tell everyone I smelled smoke but it was all a big mistake._

_I go in there, I tell her I'm hungry and want the jar of salsa, then I casually lean down like I'm tying my shoe, grab the note and -_

A soft knock interrupted his panicked thoughts. Jess was standing in the hallway in her pink robe – his Kryptonite – looking up at him with a curious half-smile. She reached into the pocket of her robe and shyly handed him a folded slip of Hello Kitty note paper. He unfolded it and read it in the hallway's dim light, then re-read it a second time to be sure he wasn't mistaken.

Wordlessly, he pulled her into the room. They stared at each other for a few seconds with somewhat goofy smiles on their faces, before Nick pulled her to him, her face tucked into his shoulder, his face buried in her hair. They stood like that, just hugging, for what seemed like a long time until Jess took Nick's hand and led him to his bed.

He'd only kissed her twice before, after True American and after he called her a "gold digger," and both times he'd been surprised by his own intensity. It was like he felt he had to ravish her, holding her face firmly and devouring her so she wouldn't have time to think, time to come to her senses and say disgustedly to her platonic roommate, "Miller, what on _earth_ are you doing?"

But now it was totally different. He knew for certain that she was in this just as deeply as he was, and they suddenly had all the time in the world to figure it out. Liberated by this knowledge, he started kissing her slowly and sensually, pausing to touch her face softly or thread her hair around his fingers before coming back to her mouth again and again.

But his unhurried touch seemed to be having the opposite effect on Jess, who was growing more agitated by the minute, pressing herself against the length of him with a moan and pulling his head in closer to intensify their contact. "Hmm. . . someone's in a hurry," Nick laughed softly, but he followed her cues and began to kiss her harder, pulling her lower lip between his teeth and letting his hands roam freely now over her breasts and down her torso.

Without breaking contact with Jess, Nick reached into his pocket and put her note on his nightstand, so it wouldn't get lost somewhere in the sheets. This was something he planned to hold onto forever:

_Here's what I wrote: _

_He drives me nuts most of the time. And I'm also pretty sure he's The One._


End file.
